Is the world’s most important climate legislation about to die in US Congress? | Daniel Sherrell

Passage of the bill would probably spell the difference between the US meeting its climate goals and blowing right past them

On April 23, the day after Earth Day, a big tent coalition - climate activists, union workers, civil rights leaders, and increasingly desperate young people - will be gathering outside the White House. If you live on the eastern seaboard and are free that Saturday, you should sign up and join them. Here's why:

Tucked beneath the headlines on Covid and Ukraine, the most important climate legislation in US history - and thus, arguably, in world history - is still stuck in congressional purgatory. You'd be forgiven if you weren't fully aware. It is not trending on Twitter. Joe Biden has mostly stopped talking about it. The enormous moral stakes have been brutally ablated by a broken, farcical and, above all, extremely boring legislative kludge known as budget reconciliation. The months-long saga has turned Biden's original Build Back Better" plan into the juridical equivalent of a Warhol soup can - a ubiquitous token evacuated of any original meaning.

Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin Books) and a climate activist